History's Strangest Guns

GIRANDONI MILITARY AIR RIFLE

In 1780, while everyone else was still fooling around with incremental improvements to muzzle-loading black powder flintlock muskets, the Austrian military was equipping itself with a repeating rifle that carried a magazine of 21 lead balls, capable of accurately hitting targets 150 yards away with roughly the same stopping power as a modern .45 ACP round. Incredibly, this weapon owed its ahead-of-its-time performance to the same technology used by your Daisy Red Ryder Carbine to shoot your own eye out - the Girandoni Air Rifle was essentially a primordial and massively beefed-up BB gun. The oddly pear-shaped stock was in fact a pressurized air reservoir good for 30 full-power shots, and troops were typically issued two spare reservoirs and a hand pump to re-pressurize the gun. The reservoir system was the Girandoni's biggest flaw, as they were difficult to manufacture with contemporary technology and required an exhausting 1,500 pump strokes to fully pressurize. The rest of the gun was no picnic to operate either, being far more delicate and complicated than powder guns and requiring every soldier so equipped to be completely and comprehensively retrained. Nevertheless, the Girandoni saw service for 35 years with various Austrian units and famously accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition as an effective hunting piece.

STURMGEWEHR 44 "KRUMMLAUF" ATTACHMENT

Designed by legendary gunsmith Hugo Schmeisser, the Sturmgewehr (literally "assault rifle" and the first usage of that term) was a weapon that could easily have conquered the world had it not entered into full production and use after the tide of the war had implacably turned on Germany on both eastern and western fronts. German troops increasingly found themselves fighting in the close confines of wrecked Russian and European cities, where peeking out behind a corner could attract the lethal attentions of snipers concealed in the rubble. The solution? Well, the ideal solution would be to sue for peace, but since that was a non-starter the solution ended up being the "Krummlauf Vorsatz" (Curved Barrel Attachment), a series of barrel extensions and matching periscopic sights in curves of 30, 45 and even 90 degrees. Krummlaufs were somewhat awkward to use, wore out quickly and tended to shatter the round on the way out (producing an inadvertent "automatic shotgun" effect). It proved to be popular among troops tired of getting a fresh dent in their helmet every time they leaned out from behind a wall. Sub-types were designed for use in tanks to cover blind spots, and attempts were made to adapt the Krummlauf to the MG-42 machine gun, but the 30-degree infantry-use subtype was by far the most popular model, leading to copycat attempts among Soviet engineers and eventually inspiring the Israeli CornerShot system.

DARDICK TROUND HANDGUNS

Half the articles you can find about the Dardick .38 contain the phrase "the answer to a question nobody asked," but at the time David Dardick invented and patented his bafflingly weird magazine-fed revolver there actually was some demand for high-capacity law enforcement sidearms among police departments who were still using .38 revolvers and had somehow never heard of double-stack pistols like the Browning Hi-Power. The most celebrated feature of the Dardick (in many cases overshadowing the actual gun itself) was the "tround," a triangular plastic casing holding a number of different types of .38 rounds which enabled the oddball feed system - trounds could be loaded individually or by stripper-clips into the fixed magazine into the grip, which fed into a revolving cylinder that smoothly rotated trounds from the magazine to the firing position to the ejection port. While some reviewers were enthusiastic about the gun's smooth action and wide selection of ammunition (Mechanix Illustrated claimed the gun was "as versatile as a six-armed monkey") the build quality was often lacking and the Dardick was just too damn weird for most peoples' tastes. A handful of Dardick Model 1100s remain, and a handful of that handful are still in firing condition, but oddly the .38 "trounds" are fairly widespread and popular among collectors.

THE LEFAUCHEUX 20-ROUND

Dardick's efforts to offer revolver-equipped American police a high-capacity alternative might have benefitted from a little history lesson, as French gunsmith Eugene Lefaucheux developed a fascinating 20-shot revolver all the way back in 1864. Using his father Casimir's revolutionary 7mm pinfire cartridge (one of the first reliable self-contained cartridges ever designed) Eugene's revolver fired from two barrels matched to two rows of cartridges in the gun's uncommonly wide cylinder, using a long hammer with two strikers that set off the cartridge firing pins in alternate order. The ungainly weapon wasn't as big a success as Lefaucheux's more conventional .44 caliber pinfire six-shooters, but it saw documented use in the late American Civil War among Union and Confederate soldiers who had the money and connections to obtain the oddball gun and its comparatively light ammunition, and customer feedback was positive enough for several other gunmakers to design similar multi-row revolvers. Lefaucheux himself designed an even stranger-looking 30-shot revolver several years later.

AUTOMATIC REVOLVERS

Auto-revolvers combine the recoil-driven slide of a semi-auto pistol with the rotating cylinder and beefy frame of a revolver, resulting in what is either a handgun with the power of a revolver and speed of a pistol or a handgun that is just as delicate and persnickety as a semi-auto with a far smaller capacity. The original autorevolver was the Webley-Fosbery .455, a six-shot (or eight in .38 ACP) sidearm intended by its designer Colonel Fosbery to be the ideal sidearm of the British cavalry. The .455 turned out to be too fragile for combat (although it was briefly popular with pilots, who appreciated that it didn't spit hot brass cartridges all over their extremely flammable airplanes) but popular among target shooters; unlike traditional double-action revolvers, pulling the trigger of a Webley-Fosbery didn't rotate the cylinder and disrupt the aim. Many years later, brilliant/eccentric Italian gunsmith Emilio Ghisoni developed his Mateba Model 6 Unica for a similar market, with the added wrinkle that the Mateba fired from the bottom of the cylinder in order to bring recoil forces more in line with the shooter's arm. While both guns were produced in fairly small numbers, their unique appearance earned them some notable film cameos: the Mateba features prominently in "Ghost in the Shell" and "Looper," while the Webley-Fosbery is mispronounced as the murder weapon in "The Maltese Falcon" and (in a development that Colonel Fosbery probably never envisioned) is featured quite often as Sean Connery's sidearm in "Zardoz."

SILENT RUSSIAN GUNS

Throughout its long history, Russia and its various governments have often needed to kill people as quietly as possible, so it's no surprise that a fantastic variety of advanced and sophisticated silenced weapons have been invented in that great and sneaky nation. The history of Russian silent shooters began with the M1895 Nagant revolver, itself one of the very few revolvers that can be silenced or suppressed at all: Nagants fire a curious "turtleneck" cartridge that helps create a perfect gas seal against the cylinder, a design originally intended to boost power but when combined with a suppressor turned out to create an ideal assassination weapon that Soviet secret police made use of for decades. The next advance was the development of the SP-3 and SP-4 "captive bolt" rounds, where instead of the powder blast directly driving the bullet, it instead drove a piston that catapulted the bullet out of the chamber while containing the sound and fury of the explosion, resulting in a near-silent weapon that didn't even need a suppressor. Subsequent silent assault and sniper rifles focused on more conventional subsonic ammunition and integral suppressors, but the SP-4 came back in the form of the OTS-38 "Stechkin" revolver. A grab-bag of interesting but odd design choices, the Stechkin has a side-flipping cylinder, loads with five-round full-moon clips, features an integrated laser sight, and (much like the Mateba) fires from the bottom of the cylinder instead of the top.

THE GYROJET SYSTEM

The Gyrojet Rocket Pistol, no matter how much fun it is to type or say out loud, was a generally misguided attempt to provide the military with a powerful, hand-held, recoilless rocket launcher which ended up being too ambitious for its own good. Using tiny .51-caliber solid-rocket shells, the pistol itself was little more than a handheld launching rail - a firing pin ignited the solid fuel, which was expelled through angled vents on the base of the round, lending the tiny rocket the sort of stabilizing spin normally imparted by a rifled barrel. The gun featured minimal recoil and noise (reportedly it made nothing more than a "whoosh"), which attracted CIA interest as a possible assassination weapon as well as a relatively low-tech way for American astronauts and space vehicles to shoot down their Russian counterparts.

Unfortunately, there were plenty of problems with the Gyrojet: Being a relatively slowly accelerating rocket instead of a bullet, it was reportedly possible to stop a Gyrojet shell by just putting your hand over the muzzle; the spin-stabilization turned out to be no substitute for rifling, meaning the round was miserably inaccurate, and unofficial usage of the Gyrojet in Vietnam found that any kind of humidity soon seeped into the solid rocket fuel, resulting in shells that either failed to fire or worse fired long after the trigger was pulled. Today, the gun is a valuable collectors item going for one or two grand apiece, but given that authentic Gyrojet ammunition costs a minimum of $100 per round don't expect to take it to the range very often.

SHOULDER-MOUNTED DEPTH-CHARGE LAUNCHER

One of the many technological booms in World War II occurred in the field of underwater demolition work, as Allied divers fitted with rebreathers and early SCUBA systems pioneered the art and science of scuttling entire fleets of ships at their moorings. Frogman techniques and technology became even more important in the ensuing Cold War as the naval intelligence departments of the East and West battled to find quieter and more effective ways to sneak into each others' heavily guarded ports. While various novel schemes to train dolphins to use bayonets were put forth on either side, the Russians came up with a unique weapon in 1989 in the form of the DP-64, an over-under double-barrel side-break grenade launcher that fired specially designed 45mm finned grenades with depth-sensing fuses set to explode at an optimum depth below the surface of the water, ensuring either a kill or serious injury from hydrostatic shock alone. Little data is available about these cumbersome-looking weapons, but Russian naval designers seem to be fond enough of it to offer it as a factory option on several of their patrol boats.